What Is the Difference Between Religion and Spirituality?

"I'm spiritual but not religious." In surveys of religious identity across the Western world, this phrase has become one of the most common self-descriptions, particularly among younger adults. In the United States, roughly 27 percent of adults now identify as "spiritual but not religious," according to Pew Research Center data. In Europe, the proportion is even higher in several countries. The phrase has become so ubiquitous that it has its own acronym: SBNR. [1]

But what does it mean? What is "spirituality" if it is not "religion"? And is the distinction between the two as clear, as stable, and as useful as its widespread adoption suggests?

Defining the Terms

Scholars of religion have spent decades trying to define "religion", and have never fully succeeded. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered one of the most influential definitions: a religion is "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." This captures the institutional, symbolic, and communal dimensions of religion but says nothing about personal inner experience. [2]

"Spirituality" is even harder to define. In common usage, it tends to refer to a personal, experiential, and often eclectic engagement with the sacred, the transcendent, or the deeply meaningful, without the institutional structure, doctrinal commitments, and communal obligations associated with organized religion. Spirituality is about the inner life; religion is about the outer institution. Spirituality is about experience; religion is about belief. Spirituality is individual; religion is communal. [3]

These contrasts are neat, perhaps too neat. As we will see, the reality is considerably more complicated.

The Historical Background

The distinction between "religion" and "spirituality" is surprisingly modern. For most of human history, the two concepts were not separated. The Latin word spiritualitas originally referred to the interior dimension of the Christian life, living "in the Spirit" as opposed to "in the flesh." It was a term used within religion, not against it. Medieval Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross were deeply spiritual and deeply religious, their mystical experiences were inseparable from their participation in the institutional church. [4]

The separation began in earnest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the European Enlightenment challenged the authority of institutional religion. Thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and William James began to distinguish between the external trappings of religion (creeds, rituals, institutions) and the internal experience of the sacred. [5]

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was a landmark. James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." By locating the essence of religion in private experience rather than public institution, James laid the groundwork for the modern concept of spirituality as a freestanding category. [6]

The twentieth century accelerated the trend. The counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by Eastern religions, psychedelic experiences, transpersonal psychology, and disillusionment with Western institutional religion, produced a generation that valued personal spiritual exploration over inherited religious identity. The New Age movement, the human potential movement, and the popularization of yoga and meditation in the West all contributed to the sense that authentic spiritual experience was available outside, and perhaps best found outside, traditional religious institutions. [7]

Why People Choose "Spiritual but Not Religious"

Research on the SBNR population reveals several recurring motivations.

Disillusionment with institutions. Many SBNR individuals have had negative experiences with organized religion, authoritarian clergy, sexual abuse scandals, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, exclusion of women or LGBTQ+ individuals, or simply boredom. They associate "religion" with these institutional failures and seek to preserve their spiritual impulses apart from the structures that disappointed them. [8]

Intellectual freedom. SBNR individuals often value the freedom to explore spiritual ideas without being bound by a single doctrinal framework. They may draw on multiple traditions, Buddhist meditation, Hindu yoga, Christian contemplative prayer, indigenous shamanism, Sufi poetry, assembling a personal spiritual practice that reflects their own experience and values rather than an inherited creed. [9]

Authenticity and experience. SBNR individuals tend to prioritize direct personal experience over received doctrine. They are less interested in what a tradition teaches about God and more interested in whether a practice produces a felt sense of connection, peace, meaning, or transcendence. The authority of experience outweighs the authority of tradition. [10]

Moral autonomy. Many SBNR individuals resist what they perceive as religion's moralistic prescriptions, particularly regarding sexuality, gender roles, and reproductive rights. They prefer to construct their own ethical frameworks based on empathy, compassion, and personal reflection rather than accepting moral rules handed down by religious authorities. [11]

The Critique: What SBNR Gets Wrong

The SBNR position has attracted significant criticism from both religious leaders and scholars.

Sociologists have pointed out that "spirituality without religion" is often "religion without community." Organized religion provides something that individual spiritual practice typically cannot: a community of mutual support, accountability, shared ritual, collective moral formation, and intergenerational continuity. The sociologist Robert Putnam documented the strong correlation between religious participation and social capital, civic engagement, volunteering, neighborly trust, and charitable giving. Spiritual-but-not-religious individuals tend to score lower on these measures. [12]

Theologians have argued that SBNR spirituality tends toward a consumerist "buffet" approach, picking and choosing from religious traditions without engaging with their depth, discipline, or demands. The scholar of religion Linda Mercadante, based on extensive interviews with SBNR individuals, found that many had constructed "belief systems that were internally inconsistent, historically uninformed, and remarkably similar to one another", suggesting that the freedom to choose had not produced as much diversity or depth as its advocates claimed. [13]

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that the rise of "spirituality" reflects the broader cultural shift toward what he calls "expressive individualism", the modern conviction that each person must find and express their own unique identity. In this framework, inherited religious identity feels inauthentic because it is received rather than chosen. But Taylor questions whether the self is really as autonomous as expressive individualism assumes, and whether meaning can be sustained without the communal frameworks that religion provides. [14]

From the perspective of non-Western traditions, the religion-spirituality distinction can appear parochial. In Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, the personal and the institutional, the mystical and the legal, the experiential and the communal are deeply intertwined. The idea that one can extract "spirituality" from "religion" like removing a gem from its setting may reflect specifically Western Protestant assumptions about the primacy of individual inner experience, assumptions that do not travel well across cultural boundaries. [15]

The Defense: What SBNR Gets Right

Defenders of the SBNR position make several important counterpoints.

Institutional religion has genuine problems. The sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the authoritarianism of certain evangelical communities, the complicity of religious institutions in colonialism and slavery, and the exclusion of marginalized groups are not minor flaws but systemic failures. For many people, leaving organized religion is not a frivolous lifestyle choice but a moral necessity. [16]

Spiritual seeking is legitimate. The human impulse to seek meaning, connection, and transcendence does not require institutional permission. Mystics in every tradition have often been at odds with their religious establishments, Meister Eckhart was investigated for heresy, al-Hallaj was executed, the Baal Shem Tov was marginalized by the rabbinic establishment. The tension between institutional religion and individual spiritual experience is as old as religion itself. [17]

Flexibility is a feature, not a bug. In a pluralistic, globalized world, the ability to draw on multiple traditions may be an adaptive strength rather than a shallow eclecticism. The scholar of religion Jorge Ferrer has argued for a "participatory" approach to spirituality that honors the insights of multiple traditions without reducing them to a single framework. [18]

Beyond the Binary

The religion-spirituality distinction, while culturally powerful, may ultimately be more of a spectrum than a binary. Many deeply religious people are also deeply spiritual, their institutional participation enriches rather than impoverishes their inner life. Many spiritual seekers eventually find their way into religious communities, or create new ones. The boundaries are porous. [19]

Some scholars have proposed moving beyond the categories entirely. The sociologist Nancy Ammerman, based on extensive empirical research, found that most Americans, including both the religious and the spiritual, understand "spirituality" in relational and ethical terms: it is about connection to others, to nature, and to something larger than oneself. By this definition, spirituality is not the opposite of religion but its heart. [20]

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who was both a deeply institutional Catholic and a mystic who engaged profoundly with Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism, perhaps put it best: "The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from all things... It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God". [21]

Whether one finds that union in a cathedral, a meditation hall, a forest walk, or all three, the impulse to seek it appears to be one of the most persistent and universal features of human experience. The labels we attach to it, religious, spiritual, both, or neither, may matter less than the seeking itself.